I know the kind of story everyone wants me to tell right now, because right now you already heard that I got broken up with. You may have heard about how long it went out for, how I was sprawled on the bed, the brown paper bag. How at some points I screamed because I couldn't breathe. And you may have heard that you saw it coming. You may have heard he had wanted a wife and how could I possibly ever be a wife? You may have heard he had wanted a face and how could I possibly ever have a voice? You may have heard he wanted a voice...and well, I will get to that. I ain't no singer, this aint no band.
I know you want me to tell you that rabbits have no vocal chords or that it took me ten minutes or maybe six and a half hours before I could get up to close the door. I know you want to hear my take on a break-up or that you want me to tell you he has made no attempt to contact me since walking out the door. I have no real urgency in telling you these things because none of this really surprises me. I didn't really expect the phone to ring. I believe in space so I guess that also means that I believe a man can hold a door open if he is portraying an image of himself but he cannot call to say “how are you feeling?” because five minutes is not worth the time. The time needs to be spent moving on to a new girl who must be charmed and swept off her feet. I don't want to tell you how it is because I feel I either understood it fully or not at all. And me, I just never want to remember anyone this way. I never want to remember anyone this way.
The thing is the way it ends can completely undo however good it was. We remember the beginning, we remember the ending and the middle-- the part that should cost the most, it's all good. This is a break-up post. It is not a story it has a beginning and an end and no middle.
I have been writing like this for a long time and in that time I've gathered what makes me for a good read. I have gathered what makes for a read and ultimately it does not have too much to do with what will make for a good day. There is a thing about living your life this way where people know you in a way that you do not know them and they want details in a way that you do not want to give them, but eventually, it stops being your choice. I made a decision either at the age of fourteen or twenty-four that this did not belong to me, this belonged to you-- the reader.
I will start like I am giving a police report because if I could write that kind of movie, maybe I would. If I could get the right punch line, maybe it would be funnier.
So dear officer, dear reader, dear anyone it went something like this-- John comes over at 3 PM and he dumps me. It's one of those things that feels like it's coming out of the blue except for the fact that I realized it that morning. I could tell through text messages how I should dress myself for the day. I'd phrase it differently and tell you he breaks up with me or that he leaves me but for some reason “dump” is the word that resonates. It resonates like the fifth grade or someone slipping their hand up your skirt when you would rather they did not. This is of course a personal matter and I am of course now putting it out into a public forum, but I do not know what else was expected of me. Remember there are two sides of every story, and well, you know how I tell I stories.
His reasons were legitimate, it went on for hours, I cried hard and he has not spoken to me since, I should not be writing this, I can't tell the difference, I told him we can't be friends and he has made no attempt to contact me at all, I still feel sick in the stomach. I heard a shit ton of things I didn't really want to hear yesterday-- you know the post break-up stuff about what was really going on on the sidelines and now I feel sad.
He looked at me in the face and said 1)"A person can be hurt and still be functional" 2)"I am not love in with you" 3)"This is the fair thing to do for you" 4) This is the right thing to do 5)I am not in love with you 5) If I felt that way for you I would know by now 6) "we tried and it didn't work 7) I am not in love with you.
You cannot argue with "I am not love in with you."
Now that I've given you the police report, I'll tell it to you the way I know you like it which just happens to be the same way it goes on in my brain:
“The thing about rabbits is they have no vocal chords,” a hunter tells me this at the age of five. It is Easter Sunday and I am sitting in the basement of my maternal grandmother's home at the kitchen table; I am sifting through jelly beans even though I have already forseen the warning signs of blood on unwashed hands. Easter Sundays are special and I cannot remember why. I want to tell you it is about Our Lord and Savior, but strangely it is not. Whoever was writing this script for some reason left that part out entirely. I hear the shoes on the linoleum floor and I know that it is them coming down the stairs and I know that the hunters have returned. They don't really walk like hunters though; more like gatherers, more like this is just road kill between their fingers and not something they went out looking for. They make it seem accidental. Like they are saying "look what I found" Their hands and accents are large and strong. I do not stop eating my jelly beans, not yet. As long as I can remember-- and I can remember a lot-- I would sit and wait for the worst of it. if it is going to come, you have to show some sort of patience.
If I know someone is going to break up with me, I do not plan an act of recourse, I just style my hair. If I know they are going to throw a carcass on the table, I do not get up, I wait to see if they can go through with it. So whether it is present day (what you may or may not want to hear) or the past I am waiting patiently for something that will make me physically ill.
Everyone is going from the upstairs to the downstairs and in through the garage. My aunts have gathered near the wine cellar and I cannot remember why, most likely because I did not care at the time. My father is there and this seems like a rare part of the memory, like a detail that should not be so prominent. He is my father after all-- why would he not be there on Easter Sunday? Maybe it surprises me because my father hates hunting says it's “brutal” says it's “butchery”. During this time my parents must have been vegetarians but it's hard for me to separate the facts of two days ago let alone twenty years ago.
There is a painting my father made of a bowl of oranges and one lemon that hangs next to the fridge and to me this means he should leave; if I did not know him, he would not be in the room. But he listens to the tale of today while the woman cut vegetables and I sit propped up at the table like there are five car accidents happening before my eyes. I am not going to flinch and I am not going to turn away. I am wearing my Sunday's best, I know how to go about this. “Rabbits have no vocal chords but they make a noise when they are dying,” Joe Trusso is standing with a knife in his right hand and a bunny in his left hand as he tells me this. Joe has lost two sons and he has been known to hit his wife. None of these facts bother me because he brings me peppermint candy and tells me things about animals that I never needed to know. Joe Trusso never went to school, not at all. Came straight from Italy. I think he may of went to what is the equivalent of kindergarten but this is not explained to me until much later, this is a fact I know now, not a fact I knew then. No one told me at that time that Joe and I were in the same grade. He tells me of giraffes ten months pregnant; about the way to skin a lamb, why you can't kill a female wolf in the summertime and he tells me what it sounds like. He makes the voices not only with his mouth but also with his hands. Joe uses his hand; his mouth is wide and his lips are always dripping with something. This is a stereotypical Italian film that just happens to get invaded by China or me fleeing the scene every four and a half minutes.
He is heavy, large and his voice overpowers the room as he slides easily between English and Italian. Perhaps the language I know best, a language of limbo for folks that now reside in purgatory. I mean, if I believed in that stuff. All the hunters (gatherers) combine languages for their own enjoyment and Joe Trusso tells me with the spit from his ears and the slurs from his eyes-- whispering in real close now, laughing a little like he'd like to slap somebody “rabbits have no vocal chords but they keen while they are dying; they mourn-- and a NOISE comes out a WALING.” Everyone has left the table-- my father he has heard enough he says “fuck off' in Italian and heads up the stairs, my own grandfather doesn't leave blood on his own hands for more than five minutes and I don't cut celery myself so I sit, I stay, waiting for a piece of peppermint candy. He moves in closer ,drunk and laughing, maybe meaning nothing, maybe meaning something “not only rabbits make this noise, Daniela, women make it too," he laughs, knife in his hand cutting up bits. And I think I know even then that this all sounds made up, I think I know even then as he leans in and says “that noise-- one day you'll make it too.”
These days I don't hear stories from hunters anymore, just men that find themselves to be saints. They stroll in and take their shoes off they develop catch phrases but instead of going with “pudding pie” they decide on “I am not love in with you,” they repeat it like a mantra, like we learn to do in yoga. I say “sat-nam” and you say you don't love me. I have combed my hair and I don't know why I expected more, I have watched you chew meat in your mouth. I think every kind of animal. Even a lamb once. And it's the nice guys that will point out that they are nice, that they are doing you a favor. They will stop and say they are not doing this by phone as if I should paint a gold star and they will stop and say that they could have done this by e-mail like it makes it better than someone else. I am going on some monologue-- some tangent-- maybe I am saying “everybody is a monster” because maybe it is fair to say that again these days maybe I am saying “I don't know you! I don't know you! My God I don't know you!” you (or really him) are telling me “yes you do, yes you do,” because all men want to be different in these stories, just like in my stories they want to be the protagonist not the tragic figure. I keep saying “you don't even want to try” and he keeps repeating “I did try. I tried. I know I am doing the right thing.” This is pretty much The Rise of the Machines, I was basically right about terminators. I burry my head in a pillow and I cry, I don't know what exactly it is that I am crying for. I don't know if I am crying because I know that I will remember him like this now or because I will have to re-do my schedule or because we ended up having mutual friends and I wanted him to hear what I sound like when I say fucked up shit over fried chicken.
The thing is I don't want to hear how this is different. I have heard from other men what it sounds like to be on top of a woman while she kicked and screamed. I have heard from other men what their wives say when they get slapped across the face. You were an angel so you can't tell me shit, you can lie on the wrong side of the bed-- on my side of the bed while I put your belongings in a paper bag and I think in my head not about you, not about being dumped today, but about life in general. Walking across the apartment I ask in my mind "
Can he not love me because I told him what it could have felt like for her with fifteen men inside of her in some back alley, some park near where the president sleeps? Can he not love me because I read about a woman who cut off her babies arms while playing Gospel hymns to help the child be with God? Can he not love me because I comb my hair to look good for a break up? Can he not love me because I finally told him all of this shit and let my goddamn guard down?"
I put the belongings in a paper bag because even though this ends up going on for six hours, even though he doesn't care about trying or what my face looks like in a gas station, I always made sure never to scratch his DVDs. In the end it only adds up to a few months; but what doesn't these days? These are the days of bailouts, so fucking do it to me baby. Fucking bailout.
When we grow up the hunters are gone. The killers of our youth are kept safely in the backs off our brains and we do our best to not show traces of the events that happened in our childhood. While I'm getting dumped he keeps repeating that he is not in love with me, and I can understand because if you were in love with a person you wouldn't have to keep saying this over and over and over again. I know I shouldn't have mentioned the butter knife, I know I shouldn't have said “fuck” when saying “get the fuck out of my apartment” I know that I should be smarter at this point then to put people in the box of angels or the box of monsters but I don't really know how. That is why I am in the box of some twenty-four year old girl passed out with her head in your toilet. That is why you can tell me that maybe I am more like a sister than a girlfriend. Maybe it's why you can repeat over and over and over and over and over again that you just don't feel it in your heart. And maybe that is why I can scream, why I can make that noise I've heard about my whole life and hold my pillow and say “YOUR HEART?” as if it is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
And that my friends is the story that you have been asking me to tell you. I cannot tell you why things really ended because I don't really understand. The reasons I was given were not concrete. I doubt his mother was pregnant for ten months like a giraffe. And I don't remember why you can't kill a female wolf in the summertime but I know for damn sure it's not summer right now.
It is not that being dumped on Saturday was like watching an animal being skinned alive, it's not that dramatic it's not that effective.
It was more like a check on his to-do list. Do it, leave, go, don't make contact.
Do not pass GO do not collect $200
Maybe to him it's like rehab or therapy “keep the focus on you,” maybe it's like pity he feels toward me. I am in fact the pathetic girl writing this on a public forum for anyone to see. For Joe Trusso's dead wife or blood that should have never dripped on to my body. Our hearts are always on the line, we know this. It's just sometimes it's the people you least expect. They can hold your head one day, they can watch it spin the next. Suddenly they forget how to knock on your door. They still know how to slide off their own pants, just like they slid off your $12.50 sweatshop labor jeans and they do not blame themselves. They will try and be noble. Say there is no one to blame. I am sure of it.
But I want to tell you that at least Joe Trusso was up front with me. He knew the kind of noises I would make when no one was looking or when I was trying the best to turn my head. Maybe his warnings did not come across loud enough or maybe I will keep loving everybody, cause I've loved everyone my whole life. Sometimes it is hard when someone leaves you. It's not about losing a boyfriend or a lover, it's losing a human being and a friend. It's the fact that you have to wake up and fall asleep in the same place where someone held you and you have to stomach that you were spoon fed a lot of lies. Those are the parts that are hard to deal with, and it's always harder with the nice guys. Because the nice guys will look you straight in the face and say “this hurts me too” they will look you right in the eyes and then they'll never call you again.
The noises you will make are not the people you will meet or the places you will go. They are not the way your lover kissed you or any promises made. The noises you will make come as a breaking point, as a lapse between your synapses as if to say God's perfect human frame (the one you learned about at the age of five with candy in your mouth, and blood on your dress) it is more about disappointment than desperation and it is more about sharing than it is about selling out. There are memories I wish I could erase from my brain, but more than wishing I could erase these memories I wish that I could erase sharing them, with someone, with whoever, with some guy that held me in bed for a few months. Tilting my head in the morning without a knife or a promise, saying “I'll talk to you soon.” Then locking the door behind him.
And that my friends was getting dumped.
I know you want me to tell you that rabbits have no vocal chords or that it took me ten minutes or maybe six and a half hours before I could get up to close the door. I know you want to hear my take on a break-up or that you want me to tell you he has made no attempt to contact me since walking out the door. I have no real urgency in telling you these things because none of this really surprises me. I didn't really expect the phone to ring. I believe in space so I guess that also means that I believe a man can hold a door open if he is portraying an image of himself but he cannot call to say “how are you feeling?” because five minutes is not worth the time. The time needs to be spent moving on to a new girl who must be charmed and swept off her feet. I don't want to tell you how it is because I feel I either understood it fully or not at all. And me, I just never want to remember anyone this way. I never want to remember anyone this way.
The thing is the way it ends can completely undo however good it was. We remember the beginning, we remember the ending and the middle-- the part that should cost the most, it's all good. This is a break-up post. It is not a story it has a beginning and an end and no middle.
I have been writing like this for a long time and in that time I've gathered what makes me for a good read. I have gathered what makes for a read and ultimately it does not have too much to do with what will make for a good day. There is a thing about living your life this way where people know you in a way that you do not know them and they want details in a way that you do not want to give them, but eventually, it stops being your choice. I made a decision either at the age of fourteen or twenty-four that this did not belong to me, this belonged to you-- the reader.
I will start like I am giving a police report because if I could write that kind of movie, maybe I would. If I could get the right punch line, maybe it would be funnier.
So dear officer, dear reader, dear anyone it went something like this-- John comes over at 3 PM and he dumps me. It's one of those things that feels like it's coming out of the blue except for the fact that I realized it that morning. I could tell through text messages how I should dress myself for the day. I'd phrase it differently and tell you he breaks up with me or that he leaves me but for some reason “dump” is the word that resonates. It resonates like the fifth grade or someone slipping their hand up your skirt when you would rather they did not. This is of course a personal matter and I am of course now putting it out into a public forum, but I do not know what else was expected of me. Remember there are two sides of every story, and well, you know how I tell I stories.
His reasons were legitimate, it went on for hours, I cried hard and he has not spoken to me since, I should not be writing this, I can't tell the difference, I told him we can't be friends and he has made no attempt to contact me at all, I still feel sick in the stomach. I heard a shit ton of things I didn't really want to hear yesterday-- you know the post break-up stuff about what was really going on on the sidelines and now I feel sad.
He looked at me in the face and said 1)"A person can be hurt and still be functional" 2)"I am not love in with you" 3)"This is the fair thing to do for you" 4) This is the right thing to do 5)I am not in love with you 5) If I felt that way for you I would know by now 6) "we tried and it didn't work 7) I am not in love with you.
You cannot argue with "I am not love in with you."
Now that I've given you the police report, I'll tell it to you the way I know you like it which just happens to be the same way it goes on in my brain:
“The thing about rabbits is they have no vocal chords,” a hunter tells me this at the age of five. It is Easter Sunday and I am sitting in the basement of my maternal grandmother's home at the kitchen table; I am sifting through jelly beans even though I have already forseen the warning signs of blood on unwashed hands. Easter Sundays are special and I cannot remember why. I want to tell you it is about Our Lord and Savior, but strangely it is not. Whoever was writing this script for some reason left that part out entirely. I hear the shoes on the linoleum floor and I know that it is them coming down the stairs and I know that the hunters have returned. They don't really walk like hunters though; more like gatherers, more like this is just road kill between their fingers and not something they went out looking for. They make it seem accidental. Like they are saying "look what I found" Their hands and accents are large and strong. I do not stop eating my jelly beans, not yet. As long as I can remember-- and I can remember a lot-- I would sit and wait for the worst of it. if it is going to come, you have to show some sort of patience.
If I know someone is going to break up with me, I do not plan an act of recourse, I just style my hair. If I know they are going to throw a carcass on the table, I do not get up, I wait to see if they can go through with it. So whether it is present day (what you may or may not want to hear) or the past I am waiting patiently for something that will make me physically ill.
Everyone is going from the upstairs to the downstairs and in through the garage. My aunts have gathered near the wine cellar and I cannot remember why, most likely because I did not care at the time. My father is there and this seems like a rare part of the memory, like a detail that should not be so prominent. He is my father after all-- why would he not be there on Easter Sunday? Maybe it surprises me because my father hates hunting says it's “brutal” says it's “butchery”. During this time my parents must have been vegetarians but it's hard for me to separate the facts of two days ago let alone twenty years ago.
There is a painting my father made of a bowl of oranges and one lemon that hangs next to the fridge and to me this means he should leave; if I did not know him, he would not be in the room. But he listens to the tale of today while the woman cut vegetables and I sit propped up at the table like there are five car accidents happening before my eyes. I am not going to flinch and I am not going to turn away. I am wearing my Sunday's best, I know how to go about this. “Rabbits have no vocal chords but they make a noise when they are dying,” Joe Trusso is standing with a knife in his right hand and a bunny in his left hand as he tells me this. Joe has lost two sons and he has been known to hit his wife. None of these facts bother me because he brings me peppermint candy and tells me things about animals that I never needed to know. Joe Trusso never went to school, not at all. Came straight from Italy. I think he may of went to what is the equivalent of kindergarten but this is not explained to me until much later, this is a fact I know now, not a fact I knew then. No one told me at that time that Joe and I were in the same grade. He tells me of giraffes ten months pregnant; about the way to skin a lamb, why you can't kill a female wolf in the summertime and he tells me what it sounds like. He makes the voices not only with his mouth but also with his hands. Joe uses his hand; his mouth is wide and his lips are always dripping with something. This is a stereotypical Italian film that just happens to get invaded by China or me fleeing the scene every four and a half minutes.
He is heavy, large and his voice overpowers the room as he slides easily between English and Italian. Perhaps the language I know best, a language of limbo for folks that now reside in purgatory. I mean, if I believed in that stuff. All the hunters (gatherers) combine languages for their own enjoyment and Joe Trusso tells me with the spit from his ears and the slurs from his eyes-- whispering in real close now, laughing a little like he'd like to slap somebody “rabbits have no vocal chords but they keen while they are dying; they mourn-- and a NOISE comes out a WALING.” Everyone has left the table-- my father he has heard enough he says “fuck off' in Italian and heads up the stairs, my own grandfather doesn't leave blood on his own hands for more than five minutes and I don't cut celery myself so I sit, I stay, waiting for a piece of peppermint candy. He moves in closer ,drunk and laughing, maybe meaning nothing, maybe meaning something “not only rabbits make this noise, Daniela, women make it too," he laughs, knife in his hand cutting up bits. And I think I know even then that this all sounds made up, I think I know even then as he leans in and says “that noise-- one day you'll make it too.”
These days I don't hear stories from hunters anymore, just men that find themselves to be saints. They stroll in and take their shoes off they develop catch phrases but instead of going with “pudding pie” they decide on “I am not love in with you,” they repeat it like a mantra, like we learn to do in yoga. I say “sat-nam” and you say you don't love me. I have combed my hair and I don't know why I expected more, I have watched you chew meat in your mouth. I think every kind of animal. Even a lamb once. And it's the nice guys that will point out that they are nice, that they are doing you a favor. They will stop and say they are not doing this by phone as if I should paint a gold star and they will stop and say that they could have done this by e-mail like it makes it better than someone else. I am going on some monologue-- some tangent-- maybe I am saying “everybody is a monster” because maybe it is fair to say that again these days maybe I am saying “I don't know you! I don't know you! My God I don't know you!” you (or really him) are telling me “yes you do, yes you do,” because all men want to be different in these stories, just like in my stories they want to be the protagonist not the tragic figure. I keep saying “you don't even want to try” and he keeps repeating “I did try. I tried. I know I am doing the right thing.” This is pretty much The Rise of the Machines, I was basically right about terminators. I burry my head in a pillow and I cry, I don't know what exactly it is that I am crying for. I don't know if I am crying because I know that I will remember him like this now or because I will have to re-do my schedule or because we ended up having mutual friends and I wanted him to hear what I sound like when I say fucked up shit over fried chicken.
The thing is I don't want to hear how this is different. I have heard from other men what it sounds like to be on top of a woman while she kicked and screamed. I have heard from other men what their wives say when they get slapped across the face. You were an angel so you can't tell me shit, you can lie on the wrong side of the bed-- on my side of the bed while I put your belongings in a paper bag and I think in my head not about you, not about being dumped today, but about life in general. Walking across the apartment I ask in my mind "
Can he not love me because I told him what it could have felt like for her with fifteen men inside of her in some back alley, some park near where the president sleeps? Can he not love me because I read about a woman who cut off her babies arms while playing Gospel hymns to help the child be with God? Can he not love me because I comb my hair to look good for a break up? Can he not love me because I finally told him all of this shit and let my goddamn guard down?"
I put the belongings in a paper bag because even though this ends up going on for six hours, even though he doesn't care about trying or what my face looks like in a gas station, I always made sure never to scratch his DVDs. In the end it only adds up to a few months; but what doesn't these days? These are the days of bailouts, so fucking do it to me baby. Fucking bailout.
When we grow up the hunters are gone. The killers of our youth are kept safely in the backs off our brains and we do our best to not show traces of the events that happened in our childhood. While I'm getting dumped he keeps repeating that he is not in love with me, and I can understand because if you were in love with a person you wouldn't have to keep saying this over and over and over again. I know I shouldn't have mentioned the butter knife, I know I shouldn't have said “fuck” when saying “get the fuck out of my apartment” I know that I should be smarter at this point then to put people in the box of angels or the box of monsters but I don't really know how. That is why I am in the box of some twenty-four year old girl passed out with her head in your toilet. That is why you can tell me that maybe I am more like a sister than a girlfriend. Maybe it's why you can repeat over and over and over and over and over again that you just don't feel it in your heart. And maybe that is why I can scream, why I can make that noise I've heard about my whole life and hold my pillow and say “YOUR HEART?” as if it is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
And that my friends is the story that you have been asking me to tell you. I cannot tell you why things really ended because I don't really understand. The reasons I was given were not concrete. I doubt his mother was pregnant for ten months like a giraffe. And I don't remember why you can't kill a female wolf in the summertime but I know for damn sure it's not summer right now.
It is not that being dumped on Saturday was like watching an animal being skinned alive, it's not that dramatic it's not that effective.
It was more like a check on his to-do list. Do it, leave, go, don't make contact.
Do not pass GO do not collect $200
Maybe to him it's like rehab or therapy “keep the focus on you,” maybe it's like pity he feels toward me. I am in fact the pathetic girl writing this on a public forum for anyone to see. For Joe Trusso's dead wife or blood that should have never dripped on to my body. Our hearts are always on the line, we know this. It's just sometimes it's the people you least expect. They can hold your head one day, they can watch it spin the next. Suddenly they forget how to knock on your door. They still know how to slide off their own pants, just like they slid off your $12.50 sweatshop labor jeans and they do not blame themselves. They will try and be noble. Say there is no one to blame. I am sure of it.
But I want to tell you that at least Joe Trusso was up front with me. He knew the kind of noises I would make when no one was looking or when I was trying the best to turn my head. Maybe his warnings did not come across loud enough or maybe I will keep loving everybody, cause I've loved everyone my whole life. Sometimes it is hard when someone leaves you. It's not about losing a boyfriend or a lover, it's losing a human being and a friend. It's the fact that you have to wake up and fall asleep in the same place where someone held you and you have to stomach that you were spoon fed a lot of lies. Those are the parts that are hard to deal with, and it's always harder with the nice guys. Because the nice guys will look you straight in the face and say “this hurts me too” they will look you right in the eyes and then they'll never call you again.
The noises you will make are not the people you will meet or the places you will go. They are not the way your lover kissed you or any promises made. The noises you will make come as a breaking point, as a lapse between your synapses as if to say God's perfect human frame (the one you learned about at the age of five with candy in your mouth, and blood on your dress) it is more about disappointment than desperation and it is more about sharing than it is about selling out. There are memories I wish I could erase from my brain, but more than wishing I could erase these memories I wish that I could erase sharing them, with someone, with whoever, with some guy that held me in bed for a few months. Tilting my head in the morning without a knife or a promise, saying “I'll talk to you soon.” Then locking the door behind him.
And that my friends was getting dumped.
found your name across the chapel door
carved in cursive with a table fork
muddy hymnals
and some bootmarks where you'd been
the shaking preacher told the captain's man
the righteous suffer in a fallen land
and pulled the shade
to keep the crowd from peeking in
we found your children by the tavern door
with wooden buttons and an apple core
playing house
and telling everyone you'd drowned
the begging choir told the captain's man
we all assume the worst the best we can
and for a round or two
they'd gladly track you down
we found you sleeping by your lover's stone
a ream of paper and a telephone
a broken bow
across a long lost violin
your lover's angel told the captain's man
it never ends the way we had it planned
and kissed her palm
and placed it on your dreaming head
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